Science and technology

A new search engine

Blekko search: first impressions

I'VE been playing a bit with Blekko, the new search engine that is still in private beta (you can follow @blekko on Twitter for an invite). Its unique selling point, if something that is free can have a selling point, is "slashtags". A slashtag is just a list of websites, created either by Blekko's admins or by its users. So, for instance, if you search for "global warming /conservative" you'll get mentions of global warming on websites that someone has listed as having a conservative bent. The idea is to make search more focused—"vertical", in the lingo.

How well does this work? Depends on how good the slashtag is, of course. This review points out that sometimes a plain Google search will give you a better result:

For instance, twitter /chess on Blekko brought up so-so results. In contrast, searching for twitter chess on Google brought up a really nice set of matches, including listing the interesting ChessTweets site first, something Blekko completely missed.

And of course, the slashtags are only as good as the system for improving them. What is that system? Pretty rudimentary at the moment. Anyone can create a slashtag, but nobody can modify anyone else's. (You can suggest modifications to Bekko's own by sending them a tweet or an email.)

I think that needs to change. Services that let users create lists of things, like Twitter lists of people worth following or Wordnik lists of words that come under some category, suffer from two generic problems: dedication and duplication. If the list owner isn't dedicated, the list won't grow or be updated. And if multiple lists on a similar topic start to proliferate with no easy way to merge or prune them, they end up being useless to the users.

The answer to the dedication problem is easiest to solve. Let people make edits to any list. (Blekko seems to agree.) The edits don't go in unless the list owner approves them. This turns each list into a sort of moderated wiki; and wikis, as we know from Wikipedia, can be wonderful if enough people work on them. The best lists will end up being truly great resources.

Duplication is tricker, and it leads to a problem of findability. Wordnik has nearly 26,000 lists; charming, erudite, whimsical, but full of duplicates and half-hearted attempts, and impossible to aggregate or search. Blekko slashtags are a lot like Twitter lists (indeed, they have the same syntax: my Twitter lists are at twitter.com/glichfield/[listname], and to search using my slashtags on Blekko you would enter "[search terms] /glichfield/[listname]"). Lots of different people might create a slashtag called "/journalism" or "/globalwarming"; if you do a search for "scandals /globalwarming", Blekko will suggest any existing slashtags of that name, but if there's a really great slashtag called "/climatechange", you won't know about it. It's the same problem on Twitter: I might want to follow someone else's list of tech journalists, but I have to really hunt around to find somebody who's made a good one. A lists directory like Mashable's makes it easier, but even so, there are so many thousands of lists on it that I don't feel like trawling through them.

Allowing people to edit each other's slashtags might help here too, because the best slashtags would start to accumulate attention and edits and rise to the top; the rest would wither and die. An intelligent slashtag search (so that if I type in "global warming" I get /globalwarming and /climatechange slashtags suggested to me) would be good too.

Blekko doesn't aim to kill Google, just to take a slice of its market. Bing notwithstanding, I think the war for search dominance (Google vs Yahoo vs Altavista etc) is largely over; now it's the era of search segmentation. Twitter is good for real-time search; Facebook is capturing social search; if Blekko does well, perhaps it will claim vertical search. But it had better move fast; unlike the lists at Twitter, slashtags are at the heart of what Blekko does. What do you think?

Do you people even read the comments? If so, how come you people never respond or reply to any comment? It looks like you just ignore all the comments, for the most part.

Anyway, their is one part of the search engine business that I don't like: the censorship of porn. This is an anonymous website, so I'll just say this. What happens is that all the websites censor porn. For exmaple, if you type in 'Tori Black' google has no suggestions. Google normally has suggestions for all other people. If you type in 'tori' it still has no suggestions. But yet tori Black is a world famous porn actress. Maybe you and I don't watch porn and don't know about her, but millions of people do, and they have the right to have equal internet quality like anyone else.

Try other porn people like Sunny leone, Sasha Grey, Lupe Fuentes etc and you will see that Google censors them.

Also, type in the word 'porn' in the search engine and you will find no suggestions: google censor that world too. and internet porn is a big industry.

Personally, I do not like porn or anything, but i am against censorship. Next google can decide that it does not want its competitors censored too, and who can stop it?

Hardcore is talking about when you start typing in a name of something like merc for example in google there is a list that comes up under it that includes things like mercury, mercedes benz, and anything else you may not know about that begins with merc, and as you type the list beneath the search box changes. Basically, autocomplete hardly works for any porn, and a lot of people feel like this censorship is unjustified.

Truthfully, it's stupid. Why have slashtags when you can perform such an advanced search on Google? There are startups that want to become big companies, and there are startups that want to be bought out by the likes of Google. Blekko is squarely in the latter: they want to excite a certain user base to create smart lists, and then sell their lists and users to Google.

But I don't think the exclusion of porn-star names from auto-suggest counts as "censorship". I'd say it's a pretty sensible, and also rather minimal, response to worries about what children can find online. Even if you have parental controls (and your kids haven't worked out how to get around them), if auto-suggest were unlimited the very first words to come up when you start typing something would always be porn-related.

@Phillip Thomas wrote: "No amount of crowdsourcing will achieve in a planned way what algorithms can give rise to if applied to large enough sets of data". I disagree. I can't think of any examples off the top of my head, but there have been cases when I want to search for something and Google is hopeless because the search terms are general enough to throw up all sorts of irrelevant material, but it would work if only I could search on certain types of sites. The question is whether this need will be great enough and worth the effort that people have to put into making lists; that's something only trial and error will tell.

@Sensible GaTech Student: wanting to be bought by Google is a perfectly rational and sensible business strategy. And it will only work if the product works.

I was also thinking that sites like Wikipedia were taking up more of the search engine business. For example, whenever I want to look up a movie, I go to Wikipedia. I then use Wikipedia for links to reviews, criticism, etc. I do not use Google for such things anymore.

Same for other things. For example, just today I was looking up some information on Race and IQ and I just skipped directly to Wikipedia to read up on the information. The google search results on that topic were mostly links to moronic blogs posts and discussions.

Wikipedia, interestingly enough, might be the biggest threat to Google.

Blekko is definitely a cool new search engine. The slash tag feature is unique and gives it an edge that people will be interested in. However, I do not think it will ever reach the popularity of Google due to it’s complicated nature. I think Google’s greatest strengths is it’s simplicity; it’s so easy anyone can use it to it’s full potential. Blekko is not like that.

Coming from someone who doesn’t have a lot of time on her hands, having to learn how to use a search engine does not appeal to me when I have Google available. Of course I took the time to learn about Blekko, but I’m in the industry. I don’t think the average person will want to do that.

I’ve done some research and I think the best new search engine is Bweezy. Similar name, but very different from Blekko. Bweezy offers Google results, which I love. It also lets you open search results in the same window as the search, which eliminates the need to open a ton of tabs! I’d check it out if you’re into new search engines.